


Refraction

by PaperKatla



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Temporary Character Death, Gen, Kid!Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 13:16:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9822209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperKatla/pseuds/PaperKatla
Summary: Eobard Thawne was playing the long game.  Wearing the face of Harrison Wells, he adopts Barry, Cisco, and Caitlin as children, molding them into the ones who would send him back home, that would allow him to kill The Flash.Or: the adoption AU nobody asked for





	

“I’ll give it to you, Barry,” Cisco said, sighing. “You always could sleep like the dead.”

Across the room, Caitlin glared at him. “That’s not funny, Cisco.”

He sighed again, ignoring her in favor of toying with the Monster Spray 2000! bottle he’d brought in for the night shift. It wasn’t like he really needed the Monster Spray anymore--he wasn’t a little kid, and the dark didn’t really scare him. Watching Barry at night, though, was different. Logically, he knew that Caitlin had walked him through exactly what to do in case something went wrong and she and Dr. Wells were just a phone call away, but it still made him nervous to watch the Cortex grow darker and to be left alone to the soft beeps of the machines they’d hooked Barry up to. So, when he’d been going through his things, looking for something to do during the long hours of waiting for Barry to wake up, he’d found the Monster Spray again and it felt strangely comforting to have it nearby. He filled it with water from the break room sink and would casually shoot at the shadows with it, making small ‘pew! pew!’ sounds.

“He’s gonna wake up,” Caitlin said.

Now, it was Cisco’s turn to glare. “I know. He was always really good at sleeping. I’m not worried.”

It was a complete lie. Cisco was worried.

It had been months since the particle accelerator failed, and the explosion destroyed the labs. The blast had been forced up and out, thanks to Ronnie, but the building still maintained a lot of damage. He’d still been holding Caitlin’s hand while she screamed into the walkie talkie when the force of the blast hit them both square in the chest, throwing them back twenty, thirty feet. He’d felt his wrist snap at the same moment his head smashed against the floor. He woke up to Caitlin shaking him awake, yanking him up by his good hand and hurrying him towards the Cortex, towards the exit. Employees from different departments flooded the halls, pushing and shoving in their rush towards the exits while the building shuddered and alarms blared. Someone in a mint-colored chem lab polo knocked hard into his side and he hit the floor again, losing his grip on Caitlin as she was pushed along by the crowd. He’d passed out again.

When he woke up, everything had changed. Everything was different, so different. Ronnie dead, Dr. Wells injured, Barry in a coma.

“We should put on some music,” Cisco suggested, poking at Barry’s hand with his licorice stick. “He likes Gaga.”

Caitlin scoffed. “He does not.”

“He does! He told me!”

“When?”

“Like, the week before when I stopped by CCPD,” Cisco argued. “It was playing in his lab!”

“Sounds like a fish story,” Caitlin said.

“You’re a fish story!” he snapped childishly back.

Barry sprung awake, lurching upward with a ridiculously long gasp. His arms flailed and his head swiveled around frantically. Monitors went haywire. Cisco jumped. Caitlin screamed in surprise. Cisco leapt towards the comm mic, calling frantically for Dr. Wells. “What happened?” Barry wheezed. “Where am I? How did I get here?”. His voice sounded scratchy from months of disuse. He tried to bat at Caitlin as she waved a penlight in his eyes. “Ow, Caitlin, stop! You’re gonna blind me!”

Cisco rolled his eyes. Leave it to Barry to manage to be dramatic about something as simple as waking up, he thought. He forced himself to stroll casually into the middle of Caitlin and Barry wrestling over the penlight and snatched it away from them. Caitlin immediately protested, spitting out threats of switching his toothbrush with the one they used to clean the sinks as she jumped to try and reach the penlight. “In a minute!” he argued. “Give the guy a break.”

“He’s disoriented!” she argued. “You heard him: he doesn’t know where he is.”

“You’d be disoriented, too, after a nine-month nap!”

“Nine months?!” Caitlin and Cisco snapped their attention back to their patient who was now stumbling his way out of bed. “What do you mean nine months?” There was a pause, as Barry looked down at his own crotch. “Oh my God, why is there a catheter in me? Who put a catheter in me?”

“Don’t look at me, dude, I’m not the one with the medical doctorate,” Cisco said. 

Barry’s eyes widened as he looked up at Caitlin. “Oh, please, you don’t have anything I haven’t seen before,” she said, impatiently. At his increasingly upset expression, she added, “Well, it’s not like you can take bathroom breaks in a coma!”

“Coma?” Barry said. “I was in a coma? You said...nine months? I was in a coma for nine months?”

Cisco returned the penlight. “I take it back, check him out. He’s usually not this slow on the uptake.” Gently, he eased Barry back into the stool he’d just vacated. “You were struck by lightning, dude. Which means that, yes, you were in a coma. For nine months.”

Barry put his head in his heads and moaned. “This is ridiculous.”

A soft whir announced Dr. Wells, smiling gently over at Barry from the doorway to the Cortex. “Welcome back, Mr. Allen.”

Barry looked up and waved awkwardly. “Hey, Pops.”

\---

Eobard Thawne was playing the long game. Trapped in the past, powerless and cut off from the Speed Force, he’d begun to lay out his plan. The escape route was long. He felt like a prisoner of war, at times, digging his way home through the dirt and mire of the twenty-first century, knowing he was smart, but still fearful of being caught. He slogged forward, though, refusing to slow his momentum.

The headlines and tabloids lapped up the story of the lonely scientist, still mourning the loss of his beloved fiancée, adopting three children. He spoke in interviews about Tess and Wells having talked about children, about this just being one more way for him to honor her memory and live a more complete, fulfilled life. The interviews he did with the children he chose carefully, making sure that they would be treated with care, that no one would ask too many questions of them. “You must understand,” he explained to the smiley co-host of the local morning show, “Caitlin and Barry are still recovering from the loss of a parent and Cisco—” Here he stopped to pet Cisco’s hair, and shift him slightly in his arms. He carefully tugged the dinosaur t-shirt Cisco had insisted on wearing back down over the pudgy belly. “—well, he’s a little shy.”

The co-host had smiled. “Oh, of course, of course, Dr. Wells.”

Eobard smiled.

It had been all too easy to track down the members of Team Flash, thanks to 2016’s Cisco Ramon and his eagerness to gloat, to seek out a bit of petty revenge against him. Once he had Cisco’s name, finding Barry’s name was equally as easy. He had thought that perhaps he might not need Caitlin Snow—she’d been just a canned voice over the intercoms to him, but he couldn’t be sure of her value, her importance.

Eight-year-old Cisco was much different than his adult counterpart. For one, he was small, about the size of a kindergartener, with knobby knees and a serious expression. He was timid, not quite making eye contact when Eobard sat down next to him in his school’s gifted classroom and asked what he was working on. “It’s s’posed to scoop up the marbles,” Cisco replied, gesturing at his erector set contraption and the bucket of marbles in front of him. He had a slight lisp, a way of whistling his words through his missing front teeth. “It’s not working. Keeps falling over. It’s stupid.”

Eobard shook his head. “It’s not stupid. It’s very clever,” he said. “It just look like you need some help on the balance and keeping the base weighted. Do you want me to give you a hint?”

Eyes widening, Cisco nodded. It was through his visits to West Central Elementary School’s gifted classroom, that Eobard coaxed Cisco out of his shell. He learned that his parents had gotten divorced just months before, and that they didn’t seem to understand why their son always taking things apart was an amazing gift. Instead, they doted on their older son--a piano prodigy with a great deal of promise, but, like most child prodigies, likely destined to fizzle out into mediocre adulthood. It had been difficult to convince Gloria Ramon that allowing a benevolent, bachelor scientist to adopt her youngest son would be good for him, but, in the end, Eobard succeeded.

Caitlin was different. At twelve, she was already cold and distant.She was still grieving the death of her father and ignored by her mother, who remained as cold and distant as her daughter. She had lost her husband, and didn’t quite seem to know what to do with her daughter any longer. She seemed relieved when the brilliant Dr. Wells took interest in Caitlin’s intelligence, supporting her studies, at first, until he was able to convince Mrs. Snow that he could provide a safe and loving home for Caitlin.

Cisco, who had grown increasingly possessive of his “Papa Wells”, seemed incredibly suspicious at the idea of having a “sister”—as Eobard presented it—but warmed up to the idea once Caitlin silently and casually produced a piece of candy out of her pocket during their first family dinner.

Barry had been easy to bring into the fold—Joe West might have fought him, but, in the end, Eobard had more power and money. Barry Allen was his. Eobard knew that it was because of Barry’s connection to Joe that he was in the right place to get his powers, but the ability to manipulate his way home was worth the risk. He’d manufacture the powers somehow.

So, yes, he was playing the long game of nurturing the children to make sure they became the adults they needed to be. He may have been a prisoner, but now they were his prisoners--eager, willing prisoners who unwittingly joined him in digging through the muck of the twenty-first century.

It was a good game.

\---

Eight-year-old Cisco sat on his new bed, heels tucked up under him, chewing on a piece of taffy, and bent down over one of the picture books that Papa Wells had bought him when he’d first moved in. He liked this book in particular because it was simple and the orange-tinted illustrations were nice to look at. He liked the little boy’s hat in the picture, but had gone in himself with crayon and drawn a propeller on it. He was pretty sure that those kinds of hats came with propellers, and he planned to invent a hat one day that you could actually use to fly around in.

The new boy-- _his new brother_ , Barry--was sitting on Cisco’s old bed on the other side of his room, looking a bit lost and out of place. Cisco had offered to share his candy and his books, but Barry had ignored him. So far, his new brother was a lot like Cisco’s old brother.

“Now, Barry has had a terrible thing happen,” Papa Wells had explained to Caitlin and Cisco over dinner a few days before. Cisco remembered it pretty well because it had been Friday night, which meant he was allowed to have dessert first, if he wanted. And he always wanted. Papa Wells hadn’t been as interested in the cake as Caitlin and Cisco were, though. He seemed tense, focused. “I want you two to be nice to him, but also patient. He’s had a lot of changes. I know I can trust you two to treat him like another sibling—like you treat each other.”

“Is he an older brother, or a younger brother?” Cisco had asked, helping himself to a huge spoonful of rice. He was pretty sure that being the older sibling was the better deal. While he got lot more attention from Papa Wells than he ever did from his own parents, Caitlin was still an older sibling and that meant that she got to do things that Cisco wasn’t allowed to yet--like sleep over at friends’ houses, or stay up past eight-thirty on a school night.

“He’s your older brother,” Papa Wells had replied.

“Awww,” Cisco whined. “I wanted to be the big brother.”

On cue, as always, Caitlin leaned in and whispered, “Being the baby is the better deal—you can get away with everything.”

Cisco had looked up, wide-eyed and excited. “Is that true, Papa Wells?”

“No,” Eobard assured him. “It’s not.”

Cisco looked over at Barry, curled up in bed in his pajamas and pouting. Cisco could tell he was sleepy because his eyes were drooping, even though there was still a half hour left before bedtime. “Do you wanna go to sleep, Barry?” Cisco asked. “It’s okay if you do, because I have a flashlight, so I can just read under the covers. Here, I’ll get the light--”

“No!” Barry said, leaping into Cisco’s path. He paused, shifting awkwardly. Both boys stared at each other in silence. Tall, but baby-faced Barry towered over Cisco, but Cisco couldn’t help but feel like he was way more grown-up than Barry in that moment. His new big brother was over two years older than him, but he shifted from foot to foot, fiddling awkwardly with the hole in the pocket of his bathrobe. He seemed small and scared when he mumbled, “Uh, um. I mean, it’s fine. You can leave the light on.”

“Are you scared of the dark?”

Barry glared. “No!”

“No, no,” Cisco said, trying to sound like he didn’t think it was kinda funny that an older boy was scared of the dark. “It’s fine. I used to be scared of the dark, too, but Caitlin fixed it for me.”

“Fixed it?”

Eagerly Cisco nodded, tugging Barry back onto his bed, and pointing up at the ceiling. “Caitlin and I scraped all the popcorn up on the ceiling and painted the Andromeda galaxy on it instead. We used glow in the dark paint so you can see it when the lights go out,” he explained. “Plus, I have Monster Spray 2000.”

Barry looked incredulous. “Monster Spray?”

“2000!” Cisco said. He rushed to his nightstand and pulled out the bottle. It had been a hair detangler bottle in a past life, but Caitlin had repurposed it by slapping a homemade label on it that read Monster Spray 2000! on it in red bubble letters. “You sit on your bed--see, like this--and when you think you see a monster in the dark, you shoot him with the spray and it disintegrates them. Like the Wicked Witch of the West. I only have one bottle, but we can share, if you want.”

Slowly, Barry nodded.

\---

Barry marched into STAR Labs with his arms full of boxes before anyone had even had a chance to finish their second cup of coffee. He looked tired, steps faltering as Cisco rushed to grab a box before he dropped one.

“Oh my God, where have you been?” Caitlin demanded. “You didn’t come home last night. Dr. Wells was freaking out! He even called Joe--and you can imagine how well that conversation went.”

“I was in Starling City, visiting a friend.” Cisco followed Barry into one of the labs off the Cortex, dropped the boxes on a dusty countertop. Furious and in full big-sister mode, Caitlin followed. “Starling City? You don’t have any friends in Starling City--we’re siblings, I know everyone you know!” Waving her hands as if to clear the air of any distractions that might have been flying by, she pressed in closer. “And are you telling me you spent the night running from Starling City and back? What if you got lost? Or something went wrong? We don’t know anything about your powers yet. You can barely put on the brakes!”

“I actually got back at about four this morning,” Barry replied. “I’ve been going over unsolved cases from the past nine months. There’s been a sharp increase in unexplained deaths and missing people. Your meta-humans have been busy.”

Caitlin deflated. “Oh.”

“Look, I’m not trying to blame you. I know you and Pops didn’t mean for this happen,” he continued. “And, guys, I am so sorry you had to go through all this without me for the past nine months--Ronnie, Pops’ injuries, the shitty press. But Mardon’s still out there--and, like it or not, the particle accelerator gave him his powers. It’s our responsibility to stop him and people like him.”

The three Wells siblings looked at each other. Cisco raised his eyebrows at Caitlin, who raised hers back. “Dr. Wells explicitly stated we weren’t supposed to do this,” she argued weakly.

Cisco scoffed. “Look, if no one else is gonna say it, I’m gonna: I’m a big boy, and Pops can’t tell me what to do anymore.” He stared Caitlin down, arms folded, mirroring her own posture. He felt the excitement burble up inside him, escaping in a smile that he fought to keep controlled. Caitlin smiled back and he resisted punching the air in victory. “Bro,” he said, turning to Barry, “if we’re gonna do this, I gotta show you something.”

Which was how, as Caitlin narrated the changes in weather patterns on her tablet, Barry fumbled into Cisco’s souped-up firefighter suit. “You know what we’re going to be?” Cisco said, bursting with excitement and nervousness. He waited until Barry and Caitlin looked at him, before dropping his voice into an appropriate bass tone. “Big damn heroes.”

Caitlin rolled her eyes. Barry laughed as he raced out of the room.

\---

Not even ten minutes later and Barry was at the farm, talking about unraveling a tornado like he was Pecos Bill. Caitlin chewed on her fingernails, watching the vitals on the screen blink and rise, climbing to insane heights, blood pressure spiking, heart beating wildly. Cisco bent closer and closer to the screen, chewing his lip, wincing as the suit took a hit--as his _brother_ took a hit.

And then Dr. Wells appeared, silent as a ghost despite the whir of his wheelchair. Cisco felt his heart leap into his throat, suddenly worried he was about to be ripped a new one. But that wasn’t what happened.

“You can do this, Barry,” Dr. Wells said. Cisco felt Caitlin grab his hand and squeeze it. Her eyes were wide with surprise and reverence. Dr. Wells rarely offered such blatant encouragement. “You can fix what I broke. Now run, Barry, run.”

And Barry ran. And it was fucking awesome.

**Author's Note:**

> I, apparently, am a masochist. That's the only explanation I can think of as to why I'm posting another multichapter fic up here. Please, someone stop me. Also, please leave reviews--I'm insatiable.


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